Though I was the same age I am now. We -- my brother, two friends of ours a little younger, late 30s -- were skiing. We were having a blast, I was skiing fast, cutting nice turns (especially nice considering that in the dream, we were on slopes of scree and sand). We stopped for a break, took off our gear. We were getting ready to get back out when I couldn't find my skis amid the other sets of skis leaning against the outdoor table. I called to my brother, "I can't find my skis." He came over.
"They're right here," he said. They were right in front of me. I said something about their being hidden behind another pair, though they were not, not really. I got them on and skiied to our group, and as I did, saw I had taken one of my poles and one of someone else's, and had only of my gloves (big blue ski gloves I actually own). I saw that the people I was skiing with saw this, too.
"I left a glove," I said, and that I'd catch up with them.
"Could be," said my brother, and off they went, and back I went, where I saw my glove laying under the outdoor table.
I relay this dream not because I think it is interesting to listen to other people's dreams (though actually, I do, especially my daughter's, whose are and have always been of graphic bloody terror). I tell it because I know that this will someday happen. I see it happening with older family members, one in particular. They do not make excuses, as I did in the dream; they sort of laugh it off. But one can sense how the ground beneath their feet is not what it once was. I read that Paul Newman said, a year before his death, that he no longer felt steady, and that "the problem with getting older is you still remember how things used to be."
I don't sense the ground beneath my feet becoming precarious, though inevitably, it will, and it won't be the ground that's changed. I swam across the Columbia River last week, 1.1 miles. I loved it so much, I could have swam it again, and two days later, did. Hmm.